


i remember us alone

by orphan_account



Category: Years & Years (Band)
Genre: Anyways, Car Accidents, M/M, Past Car Accident, although Olly's only spoken about, but like it doesn't happen in the fic?, but that's :) not the point, more like, one of them is dead guess who, rip..... maybe because she's a dog, zey's also in it but there's no character tag for her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-14 06:33:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7157468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in which olly is gone and emre might as well be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i remember us alone

**Author's Note:**

> title from "shine" by years & years
> 
> enjoy !

Emre wipes his feet on the mat. The door to his flat closes behind him, and he doesn't remember touching it so that must've been the wind. The weather outside is not very pleasant, but thunderstorms calm him down for some reason. He stands in the doorway for a few moments before looking down at his feet. Zey is there, and she's got the leash attached to her, and Emre seems to realize in that moment that he's holding the other end of her leash and Zey is the whole reason he'd decided to go back home in the first place. She jumps around and gets muddy paw tracks on the white tile. Emre groans.

He turns, locks the door behind him, and bends down to unhook the leash from Zey's collar. The damned dog–with dark brown dirt streaks down her once pristine white fur–immediately darts to the other end of the flat and comes racing back to Emre in the span of what feels like five seconds. There's more mud on the tile. He smiles, and it's soft and fond and he shakes his head as he stares down at her. She barks, and he chuckles.

Emre hears footsteps, and he looks up to see Mikey. Mikey's wearing this smile on his face like he doesn't want to be smiling and it takes Emre a moment to process why he's there, in _Emre's_ flat, and when he finally remembers he really wishes he didn't. "Hey, Mikey."

"Hi." 

It's very quiet. It's too quiet. Emre hears Zey barking–she's probably hungry–but it sounds very distant, and they're staring at each other in silence for a long time before Mikey nods, pursing his lips, turns on the ball of his foot, and walks toward the kitchen. Zey follows at his heels. Emre stands by himself, motionless, for a few moments before he walks to his bedroom. It feels so weird to say that. _His_ bedroom. Not _their_ bedroom. Not _our_ bedroom. Everything changes without Olly.

He pushes the door and immediately notices the light pouring into the room. It's too bright. He draws the curtains sitting behind his desk. It's too dark. Rinse and repeat. He does this a few times, cursing under his breath, until his elbow bumps something on the desk as he's tearing the curtains open. He hears glass shatter and his heart stops.

He almost doesn't want to look because he knows what fell and he'll cause himself pain if he sees it, but he's in his right mind enough to know that broken glass in his foot will probably hurt more–physically at least–than this. And he also can't leave it on the ground forever. Zey will get to it, probably, and he doesn't want that to happen. He visibly flinches at the mere idea.

So Emre crouches down, one knee up. And with his fucking amazing luck, the picture frame had fallen face-down, so he's the lucky bastard who gets to flip it over. He hesitates at first, picking it up gingerly as though it might bite him. Shards of glass fall from its face. He flips it, and he lets in a sharp intake of breath.

The picture makes him feel a shit ton of emotions at once, but right then he feels like a proper idiot because he goes to wipe away at the glass and gets a few pieces in his finger. And it hurts.

"Shit!"

There's loud footsteps down the hallway, and he hears Mikey yelling, "You okay, E?"

"Yeah, sorry." He wipes at his finger and the little pieces come flying off. He doesn't worry about them or where they could be. That's a problem for later.

He shakes at the picture frame until the spare pieces fall off and places the frame on the desk with care, moving to open the curtains again and keeping them that way. He looks down at the picture for real, for the first time in a while.

His head's reeling for some reason, and he feels his throat start to hurt but shakes it off with a deep breath. There is going to be a lot of regret, he realizes as he picks up the frame again. He just notices that his hand is shaking.

The picture is of Olly and him. Emre swallows the lump in his throat and exhales, shaky and fueled by emotion alone. His eyes scan the piece of picture paper, through the remaining shards of glass, and he studies Olly's face, burns the wide smiling, eyes-shut, genuinely happy face into his mind. He forces Olly's habitual peace sign into his memory. He won't let himself forget, even if he's trying his hardest to do just that.

And before he can stop himself, he's picked up his phone, and he's going to his text messages, and he scrolls up to the last time Olly texted him first. There is a lot of scrolling because Emre sent at least ten messages that Olly never replied to. He doesn't let himself read the messages at first; instead, he calls Olly, and it goes to voicemail. Obviously. He calls him two more times, though, just to hear his voice and get himself emotional even though he was already crying after the first try.

So he reads the messages instead, he reads them because there's nothing he can do about his present situation and it's not like he's doing much else after the fact. All he's been doing is fucking around with beats on his laptop lately, but he's got nothing to actually do with them. No voice for his music. The thought makes his throat physically close.

_EMRE HIHI_

_hey olls! whats up_

_OK HI SO U KNOW HOW I MIGHT HAVE GONE TO AN AUDITION TODAY_

_what i didn't know that wtf?_

_WELL I DID_

_oh my god how was it what was it for im so confused_

_IIIIIII GOT IT AHH AAAAH AH_ and then Olly had thrown in something like twenty emojis, probably half of which were confetti emojis. The rest consisted of kissing faces and balloons.

_what the hell why didn't you tell me omg!! do u want me & mikey to go get you_

_NO IM IN A CAB ALREADY ILL CALL U WHEN IM GETTING HOME OK I LOVE UUU_ and there were another four kissing faces.

Something like twenty minutes later, Emre had gotten a text from Olly reading _im so sorry there's a lot of traffic and idk somethings weird i kinda feel iffy about this_ and Emre had replied with _it's gonna be fine olly i love u but hurry so i can kiss you!!!_

_i love yu emrre_

Two hours later, Olly was still not home and Emre was still wide awake, because he'd told himself he wasn't going to sleep until Olly got home and he'd keep that promise to himself if it meant he had to tape his eyelids to his forehead to keep his eyes open. Emre scrolls past the massive amount of texts that he'd sent Olly. There must be around thirty. All of them read something like _hey olly_ or _are u ok_ or _please answer me_ or _i love you i love you are you all right_ but there was no answer. There was never an answer. He wouldn't get an answer. He could get a call, and he would yell and cry, and he would shake crawling into bed that night alone for the first time in a long time. He would live in denial, because there's no way that Olly is actually gone–he wouldn't be allowed to be alone–he would wake up from nightmares screaming with hot tear tracks down his face–

Emre presses edit on his messages as though he's going to delete the conversation, but he can't bring himself to do it. There's so many things in there that he has to–he _needs_ to–remember, that it's not worth deleting it to get rid of what he wants to forget. He remembers so much.

He remembers the days where he'd be wrapped around Olly, bodies tangled beneath the bedsheets, a vineyard under the covers made of their whole beings. He remembers pressing soft kisses to Olly's lips, his nose, his forehead; he remembers tugging at Olly's curls, twisting the coils around his fingers.

But Emre still tugs at things–he tugs at the staples on packets of paper, at the fabric of the extra pillow on his bed, at the tie around the neck of his funeral suit–and he feels tugs right back, tugs on his heartstrings and tugs on his ankles and wrists telling him to let everything go because he's lost the one thing he thought he never would.

He drags his hands down his face, sits on the edge of his bed, lets himself go limp as he falls backwards onto the mattress. He takes a deep breath and purses his lips. Their– _his_  room doesn't smell like Olly anymore. Olly's things are still there. His glasses are still sat on the table beside the bed. It feels as though he's so obviously there that he can't truly be gone.

But he is. He's gone. He's there, but he's gone, and Emre wishes he could've done something more. Olly is gone.

He gets up from the bed, and it creaks as he lifts himself slowly. He bends down to pick up the pieces of glass with his mind reeling, with nothing else in his thoughts but memories he's tried so hard to repress up until this moment.

And in that moment, he resolves that there's one thing he won't allow to happen, it's that Olly goes forgotten. There's way too much to remember.


End file.
